How to make feed efficiency work for you
Cow Maintenance -
reduced mature cow size along with improved feed conversion
Feedlot Efficiency - F:G, less pounds of feed for
gain
Quality Pounds to Town - quality pounds of
gain, get quality carcass premiums faster with less feed
With all the new EPDs and Indexes, it can be hard to pinpoint what
efficiency means for you as a producer. Cows that produce well
and don’t eat a lot? Calves that will finish faster with
less feed and high quality grade? Cattle that can thrive in harsh
conditions? Cattle that can handle fescue country?
In 2010, while
visiting with friends at the American Angus Association annual meeting, the
importance of feed efficiency in the livestock was discussed. Those
conversations spurred us to find a test station to see how the Green Garden
herd was stacking up to others in the Angus industry.
For forty
plus years we have been identifying our most efficient cows by comparing
cows weight in relation to the calves weaning weights. In 2004 the American
Angus Association introduced $Values, giving us another selection tool to
help identify our efficient cows, and also validate what we have done so
far. In 2010, we took a challenge from Dr. Craig Hayes to see how well our
Calving Ease and High Marbling genetics would do in a feedlot testing
facility. The perception has been that high growth cattle are very efficient
in a feedlot setting, but when you add high marbling, calving ease genetics
to the mix, their feed efficiency goes down. We sent 25 bulls out of 5
different sires to the Hays Beef Development Center in Iowa, to find out who
was eating how much and who was converting well. The results of that 1st
test showed a significant difference in individual data, some of the animals
that we assumed would do well ended up at the bottom of the list. The lowest
DMI (Dry Matter Intake) was 19.0 and the highest was 29.7, from a feed cost
point of view that is a huge difference.
Gardens Pay Back was one of
the first animals we put through feed test in Iowa. He is #51 of Current
Angus Sires for DMI with -1.30, he also has an RADG of +.29 putting him in
the top 10% of the breed for feed conversion. That means that he doesn’t eat
much, and what he does eat he converts into pounds. While on test Pay Back ate 18lbs of feed a day and
gained 5.29 lbs/day with an adjusted yearling weight of 1215.
While another bull in the same test, Gardens Image M01 ate 32 pounds of feed and gained 5.01 pounds per day
and weighed 1230 at yearling. The comparison made us sit up and take notice, if we
could consistently produce cattle that eat 5 to 15 pounds of feed a day less
and still have the same amount of gain, that would be a huge economic
benefit to our customers. His sire Gardens Tsunami I36 is the #39 DMI bull of
the breed, his ADG was 4.64 and his adjusted yearling weight was 1315. These
animals are not scrawny, non-performing cattle, they are simply extremely
efficient, while keeping mature size in check. They are not the biggest
animals, but they are by no means the smallest. This is where we think the
industry is heading, especially with the blowback we are starting to see
from packing plants about carcass size.
We continued testing bulls in Iowa for the next 3 years, 25 in the spring
and 25 in the fall, and continued to see a wide spread from the highest and
lowest intake animals. Additional feed efficiency studies led us to consider
testing our young females as well as bulls. So in 2013, we installed
our own
GrowSafe system, now we can test all of our young animals without
having to pick and choose who we think will do well. Our replacement females
are selected from the top 1/3 for a combination of DMI and ADG, along with
our stringent carcass requirements. We are seeing a directional change in
our program using the information from the GrowSafe System, and look forward
to seeing how we can keep improving our product for our customers.
Cow Maintenance -
Today Green Garden has 4 Current Sires, 10 Current Dams, 29 Non Parent
Bulls and 12 Non Parent Cows in the AAA top 100 list for DMI EPD. Some
people say "Great, but doesn’t that just mean they are smaller cattle?" That
all depends on how efficiently they convert what they eat.
There are a few facts of life,
one of those is that maintenance levels for a larger body mass are simply
more than for a smaller body mass. Some of this can be offset by the feed
efficiency of the individual animal. Now we are making breeding and culling
decisions on our females with actual feed intake performance, not just on animal weight and
height. We had a few surprises along the way, there were some smaller cows
that were not the efficient little wonders we thought they would be, and we
had some larger animals that consistently converted feed better than their
smaller counterparts. We now have several years of feed intake data on our
yearling heifers.
This year, we had the opportunity to be part of a
new research study being conducted by the Oklahoma Sate University.
They put together t
wenty low intake
high/efficiency females (19 from Green Garden) and twenty high intake/high
growth females t
o compare cow feed
efficiency and mature cow maintenance levels. We are very
excited to see what comes of this study in the future.
Feedlot Efficiency -
When you are feeding out your calves,
weather in your own pens or in a feedlot, F:G is an important number for
you. This is where our
GrowSafe numbers come in very handy. One of the
easiest to compare is from one of our first groups that we fed out in Iowa.
Bulls A and B, each gained 4.73 pounds per day. Bull A consumed 14.2 lbs of
feed a day, while Bull B consumed 30.3lbs. For every pound of gain, bull A
consumed 3.04 lbs of feed, and Bull B consumed 5.77 lbs of feed. The
difference in the feed costs between these two animals is substantial.
If we keep it simple and say that each pound of feed costs .50 and each bull
needs to gain 500 pounds to get to slaughter weight. Bull A would cost $760
and Bull B would cost $1,442.50, simply on feed. Another example of how feed
efficiency effects your bottom line, Bull C and Bull D both ate 23 pounds of feed
per day, Bull C gained 5.3 pounds per day and Bull D gained 3.36 pounds per
day. To gain 500 pounds to get to slaughter weight, Bull C takes 95 days,
while Bull D takes 149 days. We are trying to couple these two traits
together to make animals that finish in less days on feed and eat less
pounds of feed per day.
We are now getting to the point where we are
feeding animals that have been bred with feed efficiency in mind from a
feedlot standpoint, and the results are encouraging. One bull from our last
group of Falls ate 15.5 pounds per day and gained 4.9 pounds, for a feed to
gain of 3.16. Aside from the phenomenal difference between that and the
commercial feedlot average of a feed to gain of 6.0, he was bred to be a
good converter and he performed that way too. His sire is Gardens Pay Back
with a F:G of 3.4, and his dam had a F:G of 4.6, her mother had a F:G of
2.7.
Click Here for more information on our GrowSafe systemQuality Pounds to Town -
Now that we
know how to save money getting to the slaughter floor, let's take a look at
premiums when you get there. With our genetics hitting the best premiums and
the least amount of discounts is very possible. Not only can you save on
inputs getting to slaughter, when you get there you are more likely to have
carcass quality in the upper 2/3rds of Choice and Prime premiums, while
still being able to pick up premiums on YG and avoid discounts on carcass
weight.
LM_CT155
St. Joseph, MO Mon Dec 10, 2018
USDA Market News Service
NATIONAL WEEKLY DIRECT
SLAUGHTER CATTLE - PREMIUMS AND DISCOUNTS
For the Week of: 12/10/2018
Value Adjustments
Range Simple Avg. Change
Quality:
Prime
0.00 - 26.00 11.43 0.20
Choice
0.00 - 0.00 0.00
0.00Select
(18.00)- (8.00) (13.83) 0.59
Standard
(63.00)- (10.00) (31.21) 0.22
CAB
2.00 - 6.00 3.78
0.11All Natural
25.00 - 50.00 31.40 0.00
NHTC
16.00 - 23.00 19.88 0.00
Dairy - Type
(14.00)- 0.00 (2.67) 0.00
Bullock/Stag
(55.00)- (15.00) (34.50) 0.00
Hardbone
(63.00)- (20.00) (36.23) 0.15
Dark Cutter
(55.00)- (20.00) (35.38) 0.00
Over 30 Months of Age
(40.00)- 0.00 (16.69) 0.00
*
Cutability Yield Grade,
Fat/Inches1.0-2.0 <
.10"
0.00 - 8.00 3.86
0.002.0-2.5 < .20"
0.00 - 5.00 2.00
0.002.5-3.0 < .40"
0.00 - 5.00 1.64
0.003.0-3.5 < .60"
0.00 - 0.00 0.00
0.003.5-4.0 < .80"
0.00 - 0.00 0.00
0.004.0-5.0 < 1.2"
(15.00)- (8.00) (11.93) 0.00
5.0/up > 1.2"
(25.00)- (10.00) (17.79) 0.00
Weight:
400-500 lbs
(40.00)- 0.00 (30.71) 0.00
500-550 lbs
(40.00)- 0.00 (22.47) 0.00
550-600 lbs
(35.00)- 0.00 (9.47) 0.00
600-900 lbs
0.00 - 0.00 0.00
0.00900-1000 lbs
(15.00)- 0.00 (2.00) 0.00
1000-1050 lbs
(20.00)- 0.00 (7.00) 0.00
over 1050 lbs
(50.00)- (5.00) (23.67) 0.00
